Saltworkstudio Florence: Halos, Angels, Demons, and the In-Betweens

Image | October 22, 2022October 22, 2022 | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

The heads of the saints or angels are drowning in gold, their heads barely breaking the metallic water. The halos expand to fill the whole heaven.

If you blur your eyes for a moment, you’re in a different world: the world of impossible beauty (angels) and unfortunately conceivable horror (the demons). There’s so much gold that it creates its own pattern in the negative spaces. Or should I say positive spaces? Heaven seems more real than earth.

This is what I call the “horseshoe effect.”

I think this is Lippi, not Botticelli— these beings look angelic, even without the wings. Here you see the misty or fine net halo above Mary. There seem to be little flare halos above the trio.

A particularly fine Byzantine style Gabriel. He’s holding the lily and has nice bird feather wings. The greenish cast of the face is because they painted the faces green first, so the flesh tones were true and dimensional because of the color contrast, but chemical reactions over the centuries faded out the flesh top layer so that the green shows through. He has the classic “plate” halo.

The Dixie Paper Plate halo, common in frescos.

You learn to recognize the angels quickly. Michael tends to have black wings and red shoes. Gabriel has the lily, and the other one is Raphael.

There are other angels as well. This memorial, composed of padlocks and silk, holds the names of women, gay and trans people murdered during domestic abuse.

Banks of silver lilies and flocks of incense censers hung above. I think incense and scent is related to the angels, because of the air element; the lilies also imply scent and perfume. These are Gabriel and Mary’s lilies.

And here’s a little altar to the angels of caffeine.

I caught the angelic Botticelli-faced person, from a previous post, walking the next day in the Boboli gardens with his friend. This scene has a touch of the angels about it for me.

Now on to the demons, and the in-betweens.

The six-winged Seraphim are holy, but if I saw a flock like that I would be properly terrified. That is UFO territory.

I found the coffin set in a wall, surmounted by scenes of damnation, in Santa Croce. If they couldn’t get piety, apparently horror would do fine.

I do like the in-betweens. Play the game like you did as a child: if only I were strong as a lion, could fly, could get rid of my enemies… and you get this Etruscan manticore… or is it a gryphon?

And now for some liminal self portraits, to add to the spooky ambience of October. Sometimes I did feel that I was the ghostly visitor, and the past was the living thing. Suzanne

In the Etruscan exhibit, with ghostly warrior, shield and oaks

Saltworkstudio Florence: Anti-heroic notes

Image | October 20, 2022October 20, 2022 | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

First there’s art, love, passion, death— and then there’s gelato.

God is in the details. Surrounded by so many enormous, monumental works of religion, art, culture, and architecture, I want to take time to dwell on the small and particular in my days.

These are not gelato covers, yet a certain theme emerges.

I decided that I would eat my main meal midday, and that I would only eat in places I felt comfortable. Because I’m traveling by myself, the comfort level of the cafes were paramount. Did they smile? I also settled on never eating at a place that didn’t offer a changing daily menu written on a chalkboard, with no actual menus. This means the food is generally always fresh, depending on what the market offered in the morning. It also means I don’t have to deal with much choice: one to four pastas and one to three changing main dishes. This is how the Florentines tend to eat, and they eat early, from around 12:30 on. If you don’t order the pasta, you can get a main plate, generally meat and veggies or all veggies, a classic protein/vegetable dish. A good lunch cafe will run out of the most desirable “secondi piatti” and scratch it off the board, so I’ve learned to go early. My main cafe refuses to speak English at all to me, to help me learn Italian.

Seafood salad with tender calamari and tiny octopus, on a rickety table on the piazza.

A slice of roast celeriac root covered with pecorino, fried sage leaves, and a carrot ginger compote. I started eating it before I remember to photograph it, a good sign. This is from my favorite cafe.

I walk everywhere, so I can’t speak to public transportation. I wear walking boots, over the ankle, all day. They have saved me many times on the uneven, ancient cobblestones and in the needed traffic dodges. Florence is now fairly traffic free in the middle, but you still need to be on your toes walking down ancient alleys.

Size of wine glass versus size of water glass. Priorities.

I avoided tourist places and found three cafes that I liked. In the evenings, I cook at home in the apartment and read, write or sketch, after a walk in the silky Florentine early evening. So I have not done a food tour. I buy premade cooked veggies and food at the supermarket and heat them up on my little induction stove surface in the apartment. The food cooks but the pan doesn’t get hot. Strange!

A home meal: salad, chicken and cooked vegetables, all premade from the supermarket deli.

Dealing with daily life while not knowing the language let you know that you are a little bit stupid all the time. You’re the outsider. It’s humbling. I think that’s why the classic pilgrimage was to a foreign land through unknown places, languages and customs. The humility, or humiliation in some cases, leads you to pray a lot.

Abstraction from ancient stones underfoot, near a fountain so it is foot and water-worn

Learning how to do daily life in a strange land leads you into places you normally don’t see. The apartment dwellers take out their own trash and recycling to well-organized, labeled city bins, often blocks away. Apparently you can sometimes leave out neat bags of paper recycling to be picked up, but I have never seen trash left outside on the sidewalk. One night after a football rally in Santa Croce square, where hundreds of people were drinking outside, I saw bottles and cans left on benches, gone by the next morning. Trash doesn’t automatically disappear here. You have to walk it out and dispose of it. Then you wash the sidewalk in front of your apartment. Thousands of years of tiny acts keep it all clean. It’s different.

Cigarette butts in salt. I bet it kills the odor. You can still walk outside through walls of smoke. In Sonoma I only encounter walls of another kind of smoke

Florence makes things. It hand sews leather and makes book bindings. It still gilds things and makes silk, then fabric, then handmade dresses from the fabric. It’s a busy place with a frenetic energy, probably the least relaxed place in Italy I’ve ever been. It’s been cosmopolitan for 800 years and it shows. I look in shop windows and people are sewing, gilding, cutting, printmaking. It’s all still happening. The hands of Florence are always moving, often making something beautiful or decorative. Or delicious.

Saltworkstudio Florence: Botticelli Days

Image | October 19, 2022October 19, 2022 | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Floating into Florence with Botticelli’s Birth of Venus.

We view original art to have a hidden moment with it, intimacy. Like Venus, patron of art, we want to have a relationship, a love affair, something personal. Botticelli was the high point for me. The chance to see so much of his work in the Uffizi was a revelation. Heresy: I like Botticelli better than Leonardo. Leonardo was a techie; Botticelli was a mystic. I write here my own discoveries from looking at the originals. This is an art geek post, so be forewarned. I don’t know if my revelations are unique, but at least they are mine.

There is movement everywhere in a Botticelli painting, but in the atmosphere. The roses are floating down, her shell boat is literally floating in on the tide, washed in on the foam. Venus was “foam born” and if you look at the veils of wave at the bottom of the shell you can see the shell moving. Botticelli mixed alabaster with tempera to add a light pastel opacity to the painting. The sea, with its little waves, has the color and flatness of maps; he was good friends with the explorer Amerigo Vespucci and the families lived close to each other, so I regard the flat sea as another visual pun. Every part of nature is flowing, waving, alive. This reminds me of the movies of Ridley Scott, who often has snow, ashes or petals drifting down, especially in epic scenes.

I found out that Botticelli had probably been trained as a goldsmith after looking at the gilding used as a painterly element. In Venus, the whole atmosphere is that of dawn, and he using stripes of gold on his orange tree trunks— the oranges in bloom with their sweet blossoms to add a ghost of fragrance to the work—reflects that. He uses arcs of gold on the pebbles of the earth bank on the right, where Venus is about to step off. The shell casts a long dawn shadow.

Look at the gilded hatchings on the orange tree trunks, and the map-like land meeting ocean.

There’s a real joy in nature in the paintings. I loved seeing the nearly invisible wild iris in the corner of the Spring painting. And there are visual jokes: in Venus, the Wind is blowing a spume at her… just like the Annunciations, with their lines connecting the angel and Mary. He’s fecundating her. Microscopically fine veils show lines of energy, light moving in waves, and connect visual elements. The veils are like starlight made tangible. About the gilding… I had not seen it used like this, on simple trunks and little pebbles, anywhere else. I saw it used only for halos and sometimes on fabric ornamentation on the Virgin’s robe. Using the gilding on trees and rocks instead of halos makes nature holy. More encoded visual puns!

The Iris. The cosmic veil touches earth and fertilizes it.

I ended up spending more time with the Allegory of Spring. It’s just such an interesting painting. There never seems to be much that’s formulaic in these works. I was alone for a time with the painting; that might not ever happen again.

The leaves overhead are oranges, and Mercury seems to be poking down an orange to eat with his caduceus. Mercury loves to steal things. It is very human. I think Mercury might be Botticelli. His paintings are witty. They have humor.

This Mercury looks a lot like Botticelli’s self portrait.

I can’t say much about the Renaissance, but it was not about the invention of three-point perspective; that’s technology embodied. It’s in the mixing of cultures and the breaking of worn-out molds that the good stuff happens, the brief blooms, like the sixties. Botticelli broke the musty war-and-religion genres of the time with his loud paganism. It’s easy to think that these smooth faces are inventions, but I saw this museum visitor in the Map Room and I thought, oh, a Botticelli face. You think that this radiance is a painterly trope, but then there was this guy walking by. I snapped a stealth photo.

An angel in the Map Room. See how the maps look like the ocean/land in Venus?

What if Botticelli was your interior designer? This wall painting was moved intact from someone’s house. Interesting to see a Botticelli with earthier colors because the medium was different. I had not seen this one before. I would lay odds that the background in the painting reflected the actual background of the loggia, vineyard, and setting of the patron’s house.

An earth-toned Botticelli fresco, huge, with some strange aspects. He visually joins the bed with the landscape, bringing the outdoors in. Also, a bed in an Annunciation scene?

Mary holds an invisible baby, with a strange green pod form on the right. The book is suspended in mid-air from a chain arrangement; the more things Botticelli could float, the better.

The angel, who looks like Botticelli again, has green tree scratch marks, very abstract, on the hill above his head.

Green squiggles again, behind another self-portrait in a painting.

More green squiggle marks behind him in another Uffizi painting

Movement, bringing real nature into painting, and starlight made visible. And the faces, and the wit. That’s my Botticelli, the one I met in person through the originals. We might need him again as our world turns back into increasing darkness.

Saltworkstudio Florence: I go to some art museums

Image | October 17, 2022October 17, 2022 | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

Venus picks lice out of Cupid’s hair— Pitti Palace

Florence forbids selfie sticks in museums. I don’t own one anyway, but I am starting a self portrait series all in reflections: mirrors, glass, windows, shelves. Viewing centuries of portraits, I want to make a few of my own. Because of this cruel restriction on self-documentation, some enterprising soul has started a Selfie Museum, where all you do is take selfies.

Mirror portrait, with mirror flaw on nose. Pitti Palace

My head is in a spinning vortex of art. I am thinking all the time as I view, and it really makes me dizzy. My next blog post will have some of my ideas as an artist on all the art I’m seeing, and some thoughts on ancient art, the Renaissance, and Italian modernism, but for now I ‘m just sticking my toe in the water. I have now been to the Uffizi, Pitti Palace, the Novocento Museum of Modern Art, the Archeological Museum. I’m falling behind on my churches.

I found I really like the Pitti Palace, and the Uffizi. The Uffizi is completely beautiful in its gallery rooms, clean and modern, with 19th century corridors that access the modern rooms. I’ll get serious about the art later. In the Pitti Palace, it’s the old ways. The pile up of paintings creates a deep scrapbook or collage effect. The paintings talk to each other. Often it just gives you visual indigestion, but really, paintings love to be with other paintings. Painting loves sculpture and vice versa. From the Uffizi corridor, or connecting hallway, I viewed sculpture with paintings hanging above, and these irreverent, collage-type thoughts entered my head.

Speaking of pool boys, this city is chock full of naked guy sculptures. I was going to head up a blog post with that, but thought I might get censored. My friend Kalia said that she sort of got “Virgin toxic overload” in Florence. I am experiencing Naked Guys overload. I haven’t even been to see the famous David. I figure 25 smaller naked guys might equal one David. I thought of doing a series called “Florence as Seen Through the legs of Naked Guys,” but soon abandoned it because it was too easy. I did get a few photos, though.

The Uffizi is like an art book came to life. As an artist, you enter a wonderland— down the rabbit hole. I am going three times, so I’ll focus on it later. I got there really early in the morning, for the 8:15 AM opening; you need reservations and advance tickets. I managed to sprint ahead to a few rooms for near-solo time with the Botticellis. The sun rises past 7:30 here so here’s what you see at dawn outside the Uffizi.

3-D Leonardo contemplates renovation work and a 2-D Giotto. There’s an art pun in there

For now, I offer you a candy box of paintings from the Uffizi. See any old favorites? Don’t eat too many. I am making light of this because I feel dizzy all the time, close to laughing or crying. It’s my messed up sleep schedule combined with art flooding and the uncertainty of travel. It’s like I have to be two or three people because I’m alone, if that makes any sense. What a garden of delights. Florence is a treasure house, guarded by the curled and sleeping dragon of jet lag, and the weight of centuries of genius. I’m trying to snatch a coin or jewel from the lair.

I took these photos in front of the real paintings.

Stumbling into Florence

Image | October 16, 2022October 16, 2022 | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

I have arrived. Travel is related to art; both involve living on the edge of cliffs. The more you don’t know, the more exciting it is, for better or worse. Lurching into Amerigo Vespucci airport after 3 flights, I felt that molasses-like buzz of jet lag, exhaustion, and stress sweat. It was 16 hours of wearing a mask on Iberia air, which still requires masking in the plane, and my nose and throat were sore from rebreathing my mask air. It was night and there was a long line for taxis outside. I was having credit card problems that concerned me— would I be able to get cash? (More on this later.) And I was traveling alone, so no one was there to share the decision-making burden.

It all started to go right for me when I decided to take the T2 tram into the center instead of depending on the taxi to deliver me to the door. I had small luggage and was mobile, so I could walk to my place from the end of the tram line. Feeling lost, I did a travel trick and picked out an appealing stranger to follow. He was a chubby, friendly man carrying a musical instrument and he was heading toward the tram. He helped me buy a ticket— turns out he was English and I had no idea. He laughed when I told him I followed him. I was able to give him some advice as well. These “angels” are everywhere, but it involves giving up control, using your intuition, and asking for help.

Immediately, I was in lovely laughing Italy. The door closed and the car filled with people talking, singing, shouting, living. I was out of the commercial tunnel of air travel at last. At the end of the line I walked out with my little rolling bag and small purse pack into this scene. Sometimes you have to give up control, then a “flow” starts, and you are in the place, not thinking about it or struggling with it. Do you know what I mean?

This psychedelic setting encouraged me— it was like wandering through a dream. Vendors were shooting luminous fairy lights high into the air and they drifted down the sides of the green and white fantasy cathedral like wired angels. I arrived at my studio apartment, my little refuge for my time here.

Truly a home: books, magazine, a well stocked kitchen

My guardian spirit for this trip is Dante. He is everywhere in Florence, so that’s nice for me, because I want to be everywhere in Florence. I am collecting Dante images. The church of Santa Croce, where the young lovers in E.M. Forster’s “Room with a View” met, is steps away, along with Dante and Very Big Kitties. It was just a brand new suburban development when Dante was in town.

Your Random Art of the Day. I won’t attribute, but I saw it. I’ll be sprinkling these through the posts.

The credit card fiasco? I figured it out, but here is your travel tip, Americans… know your credit card 4-digit PIN numbers. No, not your debit card PIN which you use all the time, the ones for your credit cards. No, not your 3-digit secret code which you also use all the time. Scott had to wire me cash with Western Union, which made me feel like I was a teenage backpacker. Even then, I never had money wired to me! The credit cards are fine now, but for the first time in years I am walking around with strange cash in my wallet. On the travel edge, again. It’s beautiful to have cash. The Euro is now the same as the dollar. This lunch “menu of the day” , written on a blackboard in a neighborhood bar, cost me 16.5 Euro/bucks total: salmon, fennel, glass of white wine, bread, espresso and small dessert. 1 Euro tip. Paradise, with some sword-and-cliff edges to get there.

The bread, post-Covid, now comes in little paper bags for less hand-touching.

Gnocchi with crayfish (see the claw crawling out) at a local student cafe, 7 Euros. Dante notebook open behind.

If you want to read more travel writing, and more of the Over Underworld sketch/myth series, simply scroll down, and feel free to comment here, right on the blog, or in all the social media things. It’s nice to know that people are reading!

Happy Couples and Girls with Horns: Archaic Art Friends from Rome and Naples

January 15, 2012February 2, 2013 | Suzanne Edminster at Saltworkstudio

This is my image of true love: looking into the light of eternity, together.

The Etruscan “Happy Couple in the Villa Giula museum in Rome used to be painted and draped with fabric. They had wine glasses and perfume bottles in hand and were reclining and eating at the same time– wonderful. She had her earrings and jewelry on originally too. This is the most famous of the tomb sculptures and is still incredibly moving for its feeling of affection and love. Not to mention the great “dos”, his and hers.

Then, the Romans invaded, and everyone started thinking about money, real estate, commerce. Look at the new portrait of the married couple, Roman-style! Brood, worry, and scheme… not much trust there. And no more damn reclining in married portraits.

When not buying something or conquering someone, in their spare time the Romans loved their soft and ahem, harder , images of sex. This is a sweet one from the Secret Cabinet of Pompeii, a collection of erotic/ironic art in the Naples Archeological Museum. We did get in, though the guidebooks report this is often dicey. It was deserted. I think there’s a basic misunderstanding about what was erotic and what was common during the height of the Roman Empire. Phallic-shaped signposts, lucky charms, and house decoration: common and boring. Wall-painting series of “menus” showing different sexual activities you could choose in the brothels, especially if you’re illiterate: interesting, erotic, naughty, not boring. She’s light and he’s dark, showing the power of the guy, or something; this painting convention continued through the Renaissance and later in erotic scenarios. It’s Pan and his goat, but she seems happy.

Girls with Horns! What can I say? You can check my Mythic notes at the bottom for more ideas. Here’s an Egyptian version of girls with horns. They seem to have water buffalo horns, an image seen still in Naples because of their wonderful water-buffalo mozzarella cheese. You buy it from the deli, little balls swimming in a salty sea, and carry it home in a tied plastic bag like goldfish from the fair. Mozarrella alone is a “secondi piatti”– main dish– in Naples. It’s grilled a bit, served with bread, and that’s it.

And now some Pompeiian paintings of girls with horns. The “encaustic” they used included wax, but the paint actually used soap (lye-based) as the “caustic” medium binding the pigment to bond with the walls. These are not frescoes– the plaster was dry. These are wet, slippery paint layers. They then used the hot wax to seal the walls as a varnish on top, which they could buff to a high shine. The first girl definitely has horns; the second may be more of a crescent moon, perhaps Diana.

Horns or crescent moon? What say you?

For the last happy couple, Scott and I, the morning after our arrival back, at the IHOP at 6AM. We are not reclining and eating, like the Etruscan couple, but you see a soft upholstered booth, coffee, empty plates and cups, books, and happiness. Good enough.

Mythic notes: I saw a lot of images of Europa on the Zeus-Bull. She was taken to swim on Zeus-Bull’s back through the Straits of Bosphorus– Bosphorus means ox-crossing– dividing Europe from Asia/Turkey–in other words, the Straits of Istanbul. Europa and Io merge women with bull or cow, and then put them in water– a river or sea. They might be a holdover from a more ancient cow -goddess, or metaphors for mass migrations and settlement of cattle people, but I just thought that the girls with horns were cool. The Romans idealized the Nile as a source of fertility; Roman matrons would buy vials of Nile water at the local Isis-temple and douse themselves with it to increase conception.

Book notes: The Social Animal by David Brooks was a great buy. It’s trending sociological research, carried by his made-up, somewhat borg-like characters named Harold and Erica. The characters provide a framework for reporting findings from everywhere. Intriguing. Many are saying that the creative/artistic mind is the big money earner in our new world. Well, let’s hope. He lets Erica do art after she retires, and there are a few pages on the latest social research on music, painting, and other arts. Recommended for a rousing non-fiction read and a juicy idea source.

Studio Notes: I’ve done large paintings of both Europa and Io as abstractions.

Saltworkstudio | Suzanne Edminster

abstraction

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